Google Review I ran across

this is a great little comic book store...‎
By hempknight - Apr 11, 2009
- a little off the beaten track, but worth it. the proprietor is hugely enthusiastic and helpful, and more than willing to reserve new titles and create standing orders. this is a much more pleasant prospect than fighting off the hordes at forbidden planet... ...‎

Ken MacLeod interview

Scottish science fistion writer has an interview in the Morning Star

"Science fiction is necessarily political because it depends on what assumptions you have about the nature of society," he says.

I no longer define myself as a socialist, but it stuns me that there's a whole generation of growing up - a generation who are younger than my own children - who lack the idea of socialism as an implicit alternative...

"What might a future without any socialism look like? It's not necessarily an attractive prospect." ...

"I was a regular reader of the Morning Star back then," admits MacLeod, who fictionalises a future version of this paper in some of his novels.

"For me, in the '80s, the Morning Star was a voice of sanity in a mad world, even if it was sometimes a rather dull voice...

A lot of the formal rules of the left are still based on 19th-century communications technology - the idea that revolutionary politics are built around a top-level party line set down by a newspaper, which everyone has to agree with. The internet negates that process," he says, adding hastily that "the Star has a head start, in that it allows in voices from outside the party."

MacLeod reserves special disdain for elements of anti-humanist thought in the green movement, which he satirises in several of his novels.

"I think siding with nature against humanity is despicable. The fundamental thing as far as I'm concerned is that you have to judge everything in terms of human interest.

"There is an element in green thinking which rejects this totally and says that the interests of other organisms, and rocks and so forth, need to be taken into account.

"This is not my view at all. I'm quite strongly in favour of humanity developing and improving, and suspicious of the Malthusian logic preached by people like George Monbiot."

So does some green thinking tend towards the fascistic? "It's much worse than that - at least fascism believed in some human beings!"

ART IMITATES SCIENCE FICTION AGAIN

This is the logo of the new British Space Centre

And

this is the logo of the Ministry of Space in Warrne Ellis & Chris Weston's admirable graphic novel of the same name.

Personally I prefer Ellis' original - it is slim, elegant, sharp, is derived from our history (use of the roundel) & looks like a rocket while the other looks like a bloated vehicle which will have difficulty getting off the ground.

DUE THURS 21st JAN

BARRY WINDSOR SMITH CONAN ARCHIVES HC VOL 01 RAPTURE #6 (OF 6)
SOLOMON KANE DEATHS BLACK RIDERS #1 (OF 4)
STAR WARS CLONE WARS ADVENTURES TP VOL 02 NEW PTG
STAR WARS DARK TIMES #15 BLUE HARVEST PT 3 (OF 5)
STAR WARS KNIGHTS OLD REPUBLIC #49 DEMON PT 3 (OF 4)

AUTHORITY THE LOST YEAR #5 (OF 12)
AZRAEL #4
BATMAN STREETS OF GOTHAM #8
BATMAN THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #13
BLACKEST NIGHT THE FLASH #2 (OF 3)
BRAVE AND THE BOLD #31
FREE REALMS #5 (OF 12)
GREEN LANTERN CORPS #44 (BLACKEST NIGHT)
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA SANCTUARY TP
$14.99
OUTSIDERS #26
PHANTOM STRANGER #42 (BLACKEST NIGHT)
POWER GIRL #8
REBELS TP VOL 01 THE COMING OF STARRO
STARCRAFT #7
STARMAN #81 (BLACKEST NIGHT)
SUPERBOY THE GREATEST TEAM UPS EVER TOLD TP
SUPERMAN BATMAN #68
SUPERNATURAL BEGINNINGS END #1 (OF 6)
TINY TITANS #24

DARKNESS SHADOWS & FLAME (ONE SHOT)
IMAGE UNITED #2 (OF 6) CURR PTG (PP #900)
JERSEY GODS #10

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #618 GNTLT
BLACK WIDOW AND MARVEL GIRLS #3 (OF 4)
CAPTAIN AMERICA #602
CAPTAIN AMERICA ROAD TO REBORN TP
DARK AVENGERS #13 SIEGE
DARK WOLVERINE #82 SIEGE
DEADPOOL MERC WITH A MOUTH #7
DEATHLOK #3 (OF 7)
DOCTOR VOODOO AVENGER OF SUPERNATURAL #4
EXCALIBUR VISIONARIES ALAN DAVIS TP VOL 02
HULK #19 FOH
HULK FALL OF THE HULKS PRELUDE TP
INCREDIBLE HERCULES #140
INCREDIBLE HULK #606
MARVEL FAIRY TALES TP GN
MIGHTY AVENGERS #33
MMW ATLAS ERA JUNGLE ADVENTURE HC VOL 01
MMW DOCTOR STRANGE HC VOL 04
NOVA #33
REALM OF KINGS INHUMANS #3 (OF 5)
SPIDER-MAN 1602 #4 (OF 5)
SPIDER-WOMAN #5
THING PROJECT PEGASUS PREM HC
THING PROJECT PEGASUS PREM HC DM ED
THOR BY J MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI PREM HC VOL 03
THUNDERBOLTS #140
ULTIMATUM REQUIEM TP
UNCANNY X-MEN #520
WEB OF SPIDER-MAN #4 GNTLT
WOLVERINE BLACK CAT CLAWS TP
WOLVERINE FIRST CLASS TP CLASS ACTIONS
$14.99
WOLVERINE WEAPON X #9
X-MEN ASGARDIAN WARS HC

CARTOON INTRO TO ECONOMICS TP VOL 01 $17.95
CAVEWOMAN COVER GALLERY #3
CAVEWOMAN PANGAEAN SEA #11
FARSCAPE ONGOING #3
GI JOE #14
GI JOE ORIGINS #11
INCORRUPTIBLE #2
JUGHEAD #199
PROJECT SUPERPOWERS CHAPTER T
SIMPSONS COMICS #162
STAR TREK DS9 FOOLS GOLD #2
STREET FIGHTER IV TP VOL 01
TALES OF TMNT #66
TRANSFORMERS BUMBLEBEE #2

MAGAZINE
LOCUS #588
STAR WARS INSIDER #115

IT'S "FINE ART" JIM & JUST AS WE ALREADY KNOW IT

This is FINE ART by Glenn Brown an original artist so well thought of that this painting was nominated for the Turner prize in 2000.

According to the Tate Gallery, Liverpool, which we all have the honour of paying for

Brown borrows from art history and popular culture, working from the images of Dalí, Auerbach, Rembrandt, science fiction illustrators and many others to investigate the languages of painting and how images are read by the viewer. Brown is fascinated by how reproductions of paintings distort the qualities of their originals. Size, colour, surface texture and brushwork are elements by which original works are transformed from the familiar into the alien. Working from books or projecting reproductions onto a blank picture surface, Brown wildly embellishes his source material. Naturalistic colour becomes putrid or kitsch, figures are elongated or enlarged into the grotesque and heavy impasto, although painstakingly copied, is rendered entirely flat.

And this is from the presumably considerably greater & certainly more original & more accurate* artist Anthony Roberts who painted it in 1974 (& who isn't within the charmed circle of state subsidised artists)

As the BBC reported "Glenn Brown has frequently used the work of other artists in developing his own work, but that is true of Picasso, who borrowed from Rembrandt ... this is not new.

"He uses other artists' work, but that doesn't mean to say you could possibly mistake his work for theirs... he takes the image, he transforms it, he gives it a completely different scale." Scale presumably means some form of ethereal artistic scale since nobody knowing anything about art could fail to be aware that the paintings on book covers are not painted that size but taken fromm full size paintings.

* While Brown's Sun colouring of greeney blue may have the advantage of being more "putrid" the original has the advantage of being a colour that real planets can be.